Over the course of my long career, I had any number of opportunities to attend sales kick-offs. These were generally held in early January or February, and entailed a combination of rah-rah and product training. If fortune had smiled on the results of the prior year, the kick-off would be held in a place with decent weather (Las Vegas, Bermuda, San Jose). If not, it would be held on The Cape, in Boston, or (hiss-boo) company headquarters.
Depending on the company, the kick-off may have featured some level of bacchanalia: 2 a.m. toga parties, hot tub mishaps, drunken paddle-boat accidents. Or some level of spend-on-a-celebrity: Mia Hamm, the guy who played Father Guido Sarducci…
At one sales kick-off, in Bermuda, I was involved in a (non-drunken) accident, when, during free time on the first day, I and my rented moped entered a rotary “the American way”, and I overcorrected my way into a stone wall. This event was captured by the film crew putting together the highlight video that was planned for the final dinner. I threatened the video team with death if they included my crash clip in the highlight reel and, fortunately, they took me at my word.
At kick-offs, I mostly stuck to the content events, and huddled with the other home-office folks during social hours. (We were the ones playing Trivial Pursuit when the toga partiers tried to ram our door in with a standing ashtray when we wouldn’t join their maraud through the hotel corridors. (A free-for-all that got the company, already banned from several warm-weather venues for raucous behavior and facility damage, from a hotel on The Cape, as well.)
And these were the kick-offs….I could only imagine what went on at the rewards trips, when the sales folks were freed from the constraint of having to pretend to listen to home office bores trying to explain the intricacies of the product line, when all they really wanted to do was nip a bit of the hair of the dog and crawl back into bed.
Rewards trip lore was legendary. It always included lots of anecdotes of alcohol-fueled hi-jinks, and often included reports on who supposedly joined the Mile High Club on the way to [name of fancy warm-weather resort destination goes here].
When I worked at Genuity, I actually got to go to the Winners Circle trip, as one of 50 home office iLeaders sent along for the ride. (I never learned whether anointing 50 non-sales people as winners was purposeful, or whether not enough sales guys exceeded plan and they had slots that were already paid for.)
In any case, the trip to a posh Hawaiian destination (accompanied by my sister Trish) was very nice, and, if there were tons of drunken reveling and Mile-Highing, I missed out on it, probably because there were enough fellow home office bores for me to hang out with.
The weather, the island, the side trips, the goodies, the spa, the meals. All of it was pretty darned good, and no more than we deserved for having put the company on the footing that, a year later, would help result in its bankruptcy.
Long way of setting the stage for why I read with interest the recent article on the Just Born candy company’s decision to host its sales team to an all-expenses-paid trip to Fargo, N.D. in lieu of the all-expenses-paid trip to Hawaii if they’d hit their targets.
They convened at the Radisson, at 19 stories the tallest building in beautiful downtown Fargo.
Outside, the temperature was 7 degrees. The ground had 2 feet of snow. (Source: AP Article on Yahoo. )
That’s what you get when you only grow your Peep and Ike ‘n Mike sales by two percent, instead of four.
Although employees from warmer climes needed to invest in winter gear to attend, Just Born cranked it up when it came to the entertainment:
They planned tours of two North Dakota wineries and a winter extravaganza with a sleigh ride, tobogganing and hot toddies around a fireplace inside a chalet.
On their first night in town, they went to the VFW in West Fargo for a spaghetti dinner. Five bucks a plate, all you can eat.
Naturally, they also watched Fargo.
Next winter, if the group fails to reach its goal, they will get an all-expenses paid trip to Rapid City, S.D.
Wow! Consider the possibilities. Mount Rushmore, that big-arse statue of Crazy Horse, and a side trip to Wall Drug.
Average high temp for December is 36.1, average low is 13.1.
If that’s not an incentive to push more Peeps, I don’t know what is.
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